CISPA researchers present early warning system for mass cyber attacks

From www.eurekalert.com

Saarland University

Researchers from the Competence Center for IT Security, CISPA, at the Saarland University have developed a kind of early warning system for this purpose. Details and first results will be presented by the scientists at the computer fair Cebit in Hannover.

These mass cyber attacks, known as "Distributed Denial of Service" (DDoS) attacks, are considered to be one of the scourges of the Internet. Because they are relatively easy to conduct, they are used by teenagers for digital power games, by criminals as a service for the cyber mafia, or by governments as a digital weapon. According to the software enterprise Kaspersky, some 80 countries were affected in the last quarter of 2016 alone, and counting. Last October, for example, several major online platforms such as Twitter, Netflix, Reddit and Spotify were unavailable to Internet users in North America, Germany, and Japan for several hours. A new type of DDoS attack, a so-called amplification attack, was found to be the source of these outages.